Culture etched on our DNA more than previously known, research suggests

FatHeadFred

Common ancestry, common culture, common environment — all these factors contribute to the genomes of individuals of the same ethnic groups.

Now, for the first time, researchers say they have quantified the non-genetic aspects of race and identity for individuals of the same ethnic group.

In a study published in the academic journal eLife, researchers examined DNA methylation — fingerprints of DNA that can be inherited or altered by life experience and shape how our genes are expressed —among 573 Mexican and Puerto Rican children. DNA methylation reflects individual circumstances — for instance, PTSD stemming from traumatic experiences, air pollution from environmental conditions, after effects from maternal smoking, etc.

They identified 916 differences in methylation associated with Mexican or Puerto Rican ethnicity. Looking at that pool, the researchers identified that only three-quarters of the differences between the two ethnic groups could be explained by genetic ancestry.

This led the researchers to theorize that a large fraction, one quarter, of the DNA fingerprints likely reflect biological signatures of environmental, social or cultural differences between the ethnic groups.

Different racial and ethnic groups tend to follow different diets, live in neighborhoods with varying levels of poverty and pollution, and are more or less likely to smoke. DNA methylation can reflect these subtle cultural and environmental differences.

Dr. Esteban Burchard, a physican-scientist and professor at UC San Francisco, supervised the study, which was 20 years in the making.


“It furthers our understanding of the whole concept of race ethnicity,” Dr. Burchard, who collaborated with Dr. Joshua Galanter and Noah Zaitlen, said. “It tells me there’s something biological to race. It tells me that we have a lot more work to do. Twenty-five percent of what we see is not due to biological differences, but things associated with the idea of race and ethnicity.”

The new research supports the theory that viewing race and ethnicity as social constructs on one hand, and genetic ancestry as a biological construct on the other hand, is way too simple a framework.

Looking forward, Dr. Burchard said his team needs to explore whether these findings apply to other populations besides those studied.

Scientists and health care professionals have increasingly considered both genetic ancestry and racial and ethnic identification to diagnose health problems and treat disease.

The research suggests that abandoning considerations of race and ethnicity in medicine — as some academics, who view race and ethnicity as social constructs, suggest — would be a grave mistake, and that these lenses carry valuable insights for more precise and culturally specific medicine.

The future of medicine, Dr. Burchard argued, carefully considers genetic ancestry, race, ethnicity and culture all at the same time. He published research back in 2011 showing how far the medical research establishment is from factoring in the nuances of race and ethnicity. That 2011 research showed that 94 percent of study participants in modern genetic studies are white, Dr. Buchard said.

“We study whites a lot, and then we try to generalize that to Sri Lankans, blacks, Asians, and other racial groups. That’s not just socially unjust, it’s bad science and bad medicine,” Dr. Burchard said.

http:// www. cbsnews. com /news/culture-etched-onto-our-dna-more-than-previously-known-research-says/

This is pretty interesting stuff, epigenetics is a fascinating thing. While it's hard to argue with the results, it's harder to predict how this sort of information will be handled as this research continues. Often, research on "racial differences" is stymied by fears of our history

WinnyThePoo

I remember my first beer.

riffmongous

Why'd he single out the Sri Lankans?

Ted111

riffmongous wrote: »

Why'd he single out the Sri Lankans?

He's genetically programmed to do so.

NIMAN

So in the North, are flegs and bonfires in peoples DNA?

steddyeddy

Epigenetics is in part, trans-generational evolution. We know that events in our grandparent or parent's lives can influence our predisposition to stress, depression and metabolic disease.

It's not just the genes that get passed on. A traumatic event such as an accident could happen to you and result in a methyl group (CH3), being added to a gene related to cortisol (stress hormone) control. This change would be passed down to your kids and grandkids and make them more prone to stress.

We know that grandchildren of holocaust survivors, even those who never met their grandparents have higher stress responses than the general populace. We also have evidence that fears can be passed down.

Look up epigenetics if you want to read something that will change how you see life.

learn_more

I don't find this in the slightest bit surprising at all.

If you look at 'instincts' in the animal kingdom, if you watch any natural wildlife programme, you have to ask where those instincts come from. Creatures are born with an innate idea how they are to function in the environment they live in. That has to part of DNA, otherwise how else would they have instincts.

I don't see how it could be any different for humans, unless you think humans are somehow different in some way from all other mammals/animals on this earth, which I don't.

Junkyard Tom

So what you're saying is that you could take a Pygmy child and raise him to be a professional basketballer?

Rubbish.

buried

learn_more wrote: »

I don't find this in the slightest bit surprising at all.

If you look at 'instincts' in the animal kingdom, if you watch any natural wildlife programme, you have to ask where those instincts come from. Creatures are born with an innate idea how they are to function in the environment they live in. That has to part of DNA, otherwise how else would they have instincts.

I don't see how it could be any different for humans, unless you think humans are somehow different in some way from all other mammals/animals on this earth, which I don't.

I think we are. We have some semblance of a morality function as a majority group. One of the first things we teach our young, if we want them to succeed and prosper, is the difference between right and wrong. Most other animals, the first thing they teach teach their young is how to kill some other thing from some other group in order to survive

casscass4444

Read somewhere that when archaeologists start digging up this generations history we will be most associated with chicken bones as we are the most reliant generation ever for chicken.
Not hard to imagine since some people eat good old chicken a couple of times a day.
If you google something like archeology and chicken bone you will find it.its late and casscass going to bed

learn_more

buried wrote: »

I think we are. We have some semblance of a morality function as a majority group. One of the first things we teach our young, if we want them to succeed and prosper, is the difference between right and wrong. Most other animals, the first thing they teach teach their young is how to kill some other thing from some other group in order to survive

That's fine. I have no problem with your opinion.

I'd have to take issue with your further points though. Not every animal is a predator and needs to kill to survive. Giraffes don't do it, for example. Humans do.

Where is the morality in killing animals to feed ourselves, when other animals don't behave that way.

Not that I want to get into a debate about that, but the point is that our actions are largely based on our DNA; largely, not exclusively.

On the subject of morality, how can you show that morality is not a view that has been built up in the human dna over millions of years of reasoning, and not something that comes from somewhere high in the sky ?

buried

learn_more wrote: »

On the subject of morality, how can you show that morality is not a view that has been built up in the human dna over millions of years of reasoning, and not something that comes from somewhere high in the sky ?

I can't and have no idea to be honest but what I do honestly believe is that "Race, culture and ethicity" are just modern day buzzwords to describe the common trait ingrained into every homo sapien through its ancient DNA, which is divisional tribalism. Its like chimpanzee's, our nearest ancestor, they will attack and try to wipe out any other tribe or chimp member which isn't part of the group or tribe they recognize or are a part of. Total tribal warfare of power and survival against the other.

Some sections of Modern day society blames religion for war, but chimps have no notion of religion or spirituality and they are our closest DNA ancestor. And you're right, Somehow we as homo sapien managed to drag ourselves out of that way of existing, get out of that brutal primordial soup and evolve into majority of enlightened, forward thinking creatures who today realise that violence and war are brutal, horrifying and unwanted.

I have no idea how it happened, but it did. But that ancient primordial tribal element is still within us, it has to be seeing its been in us for so long and it manifests itself daily through acts staged by a minority, terrorists, tyrants, criminals, psychopaths, murderers. They all exist everywhere. Its not down to a simple division of race, ethnicity or culture.

Sorry now, absolutely hammered but hope you catch me drift

FatHeadFred

Junkyard Tom wrote: »

So what you're saying is that you could take a Pygmy child and raise him to be a professional basketballer?

Rubbish.

The complete opposite, actually.

diomed

That is what I read.

take everything

steddyeddy wrote: »

Epigenetics is in part, transgerational evolution. We know that events in our granparent or parent's lives can influence our predisposition to stress, depression and metabolic disease.

It's not just the genes that get passed on. A traumatic event such as an accident could happen to you and result in a methyl group (CH3), being added to a gene related to cortisol (stress hormone) control. This change would be passed down to your kids and grandkids and make them more prone to stress.

We know that grandchildren of holocaust survivors, even those who never met their grandparents have higher stress responses than the general populace. We also have evidence that fears can be passed down.

Look up epigenetics if you want to read something that will change how you see life.

Don't know a whole lot about it but I find epigenetics fascinating. I love anything that disrupts the previous dogma. A paradigm shift so to speak.
That whole fear/experience being passed down from generation to generation is incredible.

ScumLord

learn_more wrote: »

I don't find this in the slightest bit surprising at all.

If you look at 'instincts' in the animal kingdom, if you watch any natural wildlife programme, you have to ask where those instincts come from. Creatures are born with an innate idea how they are to function in the environment they live in. That has to part of DNA, otherwise how else would they have instincts.

Instincts are built up over millennia and sometimes aren't all that helpful, especially if the environment changes. Take a lion out of Africa and put it in Australia and it may not do all that well. I don't think a generation or two would change the lion all that much. These minor DNA changes could trigger more aggressive behaviour in times of shortages. Just a tweak to increase the odds. It wouldn't be a good idea to rewrite DNA built up over a long time just to deal with a temporary incident.

I don't see how it could be any different for humans, unless you think humans are somehow different in some way from all other mammals/animals on this earth, which I don't.

humans seem to be born almost like blank slates. They have no expectations of the world. Bring a baby up in Africa and it will adapt to that environment, bring it up in the Siberia and it will adapt to that environment just as well.

Turtyturd

FatHeadFred wrote: »

The complete opposite, actually.

Turn a basketball player into a Pygmy child?

suicide_circus

Junkyard Tom wrote: »

So what you're saying is that you could take a Pygmy child and raise him to be a professional basketballer?

Rubbish.

Can I buy the rights to your screenplay? Sounds like the next Cool Runnings

Galway_Old_Man

learn_more wrote: »

I don't find this in the slightest bit surprising at all.

If you look at 'instincts' in the animal kingdom, if you watch any natural wildlife programme, you have to ask where those instincts come from. Creatures are born with an innate idea how they are to function in the environment they live in. That has to part of DNA, otherwise how else would they have instincts.

I don't see how it could be any different for humans, unless you think humans are somehow different in some way from all other mammals/animals on this earth, which I don't.

I think there's two keywords you're missing on the topic

Culture etched on our DNA more than previously known, research suggests

Wibbs

ScumLord wrote: »

Instincts are built up over millennia and sometimes aren't all that helpful, especially if the environment changes. Take a lion out of Africa and put it in Australia and it may not do all that well.

True, though predators are much more adaptable generally speaking. Herbivores tend to focus on quite narrow foodstuffs and plants differ more across different environments. Plus they need to consume more to get sustenance. A wildebeest dropped in Australia in the greener bits would likely suffer badly, whereas the lion can eat whatever fauna is around. Adapting to a more carnivorous diet was one of the big "killer apps" that made us what we are.

humans seem to be born almost like blank slates. They have no expectations of the world. Bring a baby up in Africa and it will adapt to that environment, bring it up in the Siberia and it will adapt to that environment just as well.

Well yes and no. Culturally very much so, but in basic terms not so much. Take diet. Sure there are extremes, but the vast majority of humans grow up as omnivores. Even within diet there are differences among human populations. The human genome has changed more in the last 20,000 years than it did in the previous 60,000 and the majority of those changes were dietary in nature(lactose/gluten etc, even alcohol).

Grayson

Wibbs wrote: »

True, though predators are much more adaptable generally speaking. Herbivores tend to focus on quite narrow foodstuffs and plants differ more across different environments. Plus they need to consume more to get sustenance. A wildebeest dropped in Australia in the greener bits would likely suffer badly, whereas the lion can eat whatever fauna is around. Adapting to a more carnivorous diet was one of the big "killer apps" that made us what we are.

It's not just those kind of instincts though. We have an automatic flight or fight response (to put it into really simple terms). We're designed to automatically be afraid even when there's nothing there. If you are a early human and hear a rustling in a bush you get alert because there might be something harmful there. Thing is that we still have those reactions and they appear in society all the time. Take terrorism. In the US it kills a tiny amount of people yet it's got a far higher fear level than a lot of things that kill far more people. On a completely rational level we shouldn't be scared of terrorism at all. But on an instinctual level we are terrified of it. To the point that governments like the US will spend a fortune on it compared with the money spent on other life threatening stuff. They'll even invade other countries and actually risk their own soldiers lives to stop it.

I've mentioned it before, if you ask most people what 0.5% of 1000 is most people will have to stop and think. We don't have an innate understanding of numbers and we only get it through study. In the same way we quantify threats against us in a completely instinctual manner.

Grayson

Grayson wrote: »

In the same way we quantify threats against us in a completely instinctual manner.

Because we live outside of our environment of evolutionary adaptedness, and we still have the same reflexive response to possible threat that kept us alive and evolving through the last 200k years, as our time as the apex predator of the urban jungle is at most a few millenia.

It's one possible explanation for our needless anxieties and fixations on safety in the face of miniscule threat: we've been unable to completely adapt to our safe environments with plentiful shelter and food and few physical threats in that small timeframe, we still have one ear anxiously listening for the lion in the undergrowth, or the snake in the grass. Our environment now is one of delayed benefit, but our instincts are still operating as though we still live in an environment of immediate benefit.

ScumLord

Wibbs wrote: »

True, though predators are much more adaptable generally speaking. Herbivores tend to focus on quite narrow foodstuffs and plants differ more across different environments. Plus they need to consume more to get sustenance. A wildebeest dropped in Australia in the greener bits would likely suffer badly, whereas the lion can eat whatever fauna is around. Adapting to a more carnivorous diet was one of the big "killer apps" that made us what we are.

A lion might suffer in australia because it's very good at taking down large animals but maybe not so good at catching kangaroos. The native human population in Australia traditionally did a lot of traveling to make ends meet. Humans don't need to make a type of hunting work, we'll find a way to kill something even if it means burning down the forest.

Well yes and no. Culturally very much so, but in basic terms not so much. Take diet. Sure there are extremes, but the vast majority of humans grow up as omnivores. Even within diet there are differences among human populations. The human genome has changed more in the last 20,000 years than it did in the previous 60,000 and the majority of those changes were dietary in nature(lactose/gluten etc, even alcohol).

We had the biggest changes in the past 20,000 years mostly due to new food sources. It is a bit odd our body adapted to changes in diet that wouldn't have killed off people before they had a chance to breed. Yeah, Africans don't do well with milk but they could still consume it in a crunch.

The human form is pretty much perfect, it's only ever going to need minor tweaks to account for new food sources. Even though neanderthals lived in a completely alien environment to people living in Africa they didn't change a whole lot, they had some minor tweaks to parts of their body but over all everything stayed more or less the same.

Capt'n Midnight

ScumLord wrote: »

The human form is pretty much perfect, it's only ever going to need minor tweaks to account for new food sources. Even though neanderthals lived in a completely alien environment to people living in Africa they didn't change a whole lot, they had some minor tweaks to parts of their body but over all everything stayed more or less the same.

Human form isn't perfect by a long shot. But it's very adaptable.
We don't have though hides. Or super eyesight. Our noses are too far from the ground to be much use so we don't smell so good anymore. We are omnivores but monkeys and baboons can eat lots of stuff we can't digest. We can eat chocolate that kills dogs. We've lost the ability to make vitamin C which puts us at a huge disadvantage to most other animals. Our voice box means we can talk but also means we can choke on food or vomit.


But we can run a mile and jog 20 in the heat of the noonday sun which would cause most other animals to collapse and then swim out to close islands and climb many trees.

No we don't have sharp claws and teeth, But if there's sticks or stones lying around we can out reach anything. And the pack size of humans is about 150 so we'd do the numbers game on apex predators if needed.

somefeen

diomed wrote: »

That is what I read.

Still somewhat correct

ScumLord

Capt'n Midnight wrote: »

Human form isn't perfect by a long shot. But it's very adaptable.
We don't have though hides. Or super eyesight. Our noses are too far from the ground to be much use so we don't smell so good anymore.

We don't need any of that stuff, we have enough of a nose to prevent us from eating stuff that can kill us, and our sense of smell is supplemented by our eyes and ability to think like our prey), but made completely redundant once we teamed up with dogs.

The human form is perfect when it comes to locomotion, there's no terrain we can't transit.

Our lack of teeth and jaws is trumped by our hands. We can rip and smash anything we want. It's thought the first meat we started eating was the marrow in bones left behind in other animals kills because we could smash the bones.

If you do a direct comparison of human parts with other animals it will look like we're losing but as a package the human form takes a different approach to problems and comes up with better solutions. Ancient history is littered with stories of men fighting lions bare handed and winning.

It's easy for us to forget, because we live comfortable lives away from nature, but the human has been the greatest animal to walk the earth long before we became civilized. Stone age humans went on a rampage when they hit north America for the first time and there was nothing there that could resist us. Every living thing (bar bacteria) were at their mercy, and all they had were stones.

Archeology shows that the human form is one of the best nature has ever come up with. I'm sure it strikes fear into every animal.

Our voice box means we can talk but also means we can choke on food or vomit.

The ability to vomit is actually a good thing to have. Plus, being able to talk is worth the odd choking hazard.

RobertKK

I was reading this article online from the New York Times, it mentioned the Irish famine - article published on St Patrick's day.
Lots of comments underneath from Irish Americans and a good number referred to the famine as genocide.
I do think the famine experience is etched in our genes.